My Father’s Shade at Delphi At the World’s Center Amid the RuinsAbove The Olive-Swaddled Valleys

The Bees of Mt. Hymettus

Who is Glaring at Me? The Gross, Perfect8500 Year Old Venus of the Benaki Museum
in Athens

Absence in Ithaka

Cypressesby Ron Sandford

The Cypresses of Athens

Tourists haunt placarded groves as thoughimmortals puzzled equally by loss
and what endures in this ruin rich ground.

Longer acquaintance might let me name
these sparse, rain-starved trees: there Agave, blinded by a god,

who tore her son apart with her revelers when he spied on them, unable to believe
reason could not conquer passion:

there Plato, followed by students
who fail to see how all these are copiesof one perfect Cypress no one can find

that yet embodies seedbud to mature tip, withered tree to one wrapped in the green
flag of its foliage:

there Oedipus, who died holy though
his children were his sisters and brothers, buried nearby under streets where taxis

cheat the unwary,his crimes all efforts to avoid his fate,
that force we make come true.

That cypress whose green is nearly black
is a priest who beheaded old gods:that a Turk who holds his robes against the wind,

while next to him Byronwho died, despite his irony, for Greece
twists upwards below this severe light.

One day a descendant of mine wandering here
may name some cypress in turn:‘Ah! there’s Lance! He always wanted

to balance passion with reason,desire with desire’s loss,
his life with his death in a tense balance

like one of these cypresses
who thrust out green shoots against their withering,defiant to the end’.

I wander in their shade as the light pours down; its brilliant rain ignites a newer jet of green
to replace each that fails and falls

to this parched, incendiary ground.

Yellowby Ron Sandford

Insistent on Yellow by the Theatre of Dionysis, or Visions

The watchman stirs on the towerand the audience stills, shiveringunder its blankets in the pre-dawn chill:rose touches the sky thena lip of red lifts over the near ridge:when the sun elbows into viewhe surges to his feethe shouts“ThereThe beacon! The war is over!

Our men are coming home from Troy!Rome is sacked! The Turk has takenConstantine’s city! Home, from Verdun,the bleeding done! Saigon has fallen!Bagdad is ours! The Marines are leavingKabul!”I shake my head,
the vision fades, the sun beatsbeats...

A god stirs in the cypress grove where I seek shade, who dies andreturns in every hero: he shakes his staff, the ground quakes...“Leave in an orderly way” first Greek, then English over the PA:“stand away from the trees.” A rush towards the entrance...

“Sleep dreamless in the parched earth,”I say: “forget your temple, the goats, the thick-shouldered oxen, the bullsburned in your honor...”The ground stills.
No one has noticed.There is no PA.At my feet lies a cracked, earth-colored
capitol, a cypress cone to one side:a tiny daisy whose blooms
insist on yellow as though there is no other color
roots under its curve.Once a chorus of Furies danced
into this theatre so like the real thingthe great and gifted vaulted
over the first row to get away:it was all in their heads.

Everything is in our heads.This daisy stays in mine
after I renew familiar dreamsin Los Angeles,
unable to forget its insistence“Look! I am far more here than all the history you imaginein this place, not blurredwith vision or dream, unableto separate self from other,like you!”I know if I had tornit up by the roots and ground
its flowers into the dirtit would still go off in sunbursts
behind my eyes, so adamantineso evanescentso real.

Delphiby Ron Sandford

My Father's Shade at Delphi Amid the Ruins at the World's Center Above the Olive-Swaddled Valleys

I cannot bear so much loss.A few stones, fewer columns,
some tiers of seats, a ruinedarena, a thousand years of faith
gone with the temple where they carved, “KnowThyself”
over the entrance. That command still lives in my blood.
I remember the old ritualand let some fall from a cut
for any shade to drink and take body from for
an hour, but it is my fatherwho surprises me here.
“Why have you neglected me?”he demands. “Why are you
so far from Los Angeles where your ashes lie?”
“All places are the same in death.” “I loved you,” I answer,
so many years of anger spent to let me say that:
“but you hurt us all so pointlesslyand shrugged your guilt away.”
He goes away angrily asthe hot air warms these stones...
Below, groves of olives paint the valleys graygreen.
Their fruit is too bitter to eat unless soaked and steeped
until like the hardest memorywe forget their native state,
and eat. I douse my head underwhat’s left of the muses’ springand shake the droplets offlike a dog when I stand.What is the world?that this place, once its center
was so forgotten we had todig out it out
to find what we chargetourists to contemplate?What is time?Just now, the water still cold
on my face as I take in the heights, the olive-painted valleys,
I know: time is nothing.My father, nothing
but what I make of him, then and now. Myself, nothing
but what I make, then and now.I don’t need a sibyl’s fumes
to give me a madness for others to mine for sense:
the world is empty of everythingbut this constant remaking.Know thyself.It is almost more than I can bear.

Delphi, 2013

Beesby Ron Sandford

The Bees of Mt. Hymettus

I have lost my way,in my memory and this place’s
where fallen hives once sweetened the groundand bees hummed flower to flower
and the muses dance was sparkles of light on rippled water.The honey was famous.
Now silence alone hums as the sun leaps hotlyinto the Athenian day:
the slopes are bare,a military base crowns the heights,
the remnant wood thins to the north:the years have stripped this mountain
as surely as they strip time from me,and the bees! the bees die everywhere in our poisoned air.
I could lie down and wither herebut wonder does it matter if the slopes are bare
or flowery beneath olive and cypress,the bees single-minded in their dance
to gather nectar, or gone?For somewhere one man murders another
even as somewhere a child is conceivedas lovecries fill the air,
while here the muses still dance,shades of light within the noon-time brilliance,
who remember, and celebrate, and lament it all.Change is our illusion...
To say the sweet yet bitter honey of old wisdom,Plato’s, or Homer’s, or Sappho’s, or ... is solace,
is to lie. InsteadI let the sun beat on my head until I fall,
until strange lights dazzle my eyesas they dance the path to self-knowledge
I cannot understand, however artful;until my ears fill with the sound
of humming rolling down the ages,obstinate, here,
for that hunger to transformeven the bitter to the sweet
is the one unbroken constant in all our hearts.

Glaringby Ron Sandford

Who is Glaring at Me? The Gross, Perfect 8500 Year Old Venus of the Benaki Museum in Athens

I know you...At your touch the hive-queenbears and bears until her heat melts
the wax and honeycells readied for her eggs:birds collide in the woods to a union
that tumbles through the air in ecstasywhile coyote and wolf forget their rivalry
and race to she who yowls her hunger.Not for you ‘Know Thyself’ but ‘Let go,
be swept away, no one exists separately’.I remember your flood in my blood, how
you trembled in my woman who received meso eagerly, both of us sliding
on sweat-slicked flesh: even tonightmy breath grows short as my hand
makes her tremble sliding shoulder towaist to swelling hip and down the slope
of her thighs, though we are no longer young...

Bound book and ring, made a thing of fashion,decorous, not grotesque, a beauty queen
to parade and crown and possess in everynuance of fashion, make-up, dress, neglige,
your swollen hips, your bursting wombbanished, your face made porcelain
so we can treat you like a pretty teaseto please or hurt at will, anything
to avoid your force that at night or high noonmakes us cry out uncontrollably,
our will nothing to yours who throw usinto that union where not love but life abides.
Fail your need, and you toss us aside.Then self-knowledge is more bitter
than a stone’s who hungers for life,for what he would know we have known
and lost.Come, sweep me into your madness,
let me forget once more everything I am.

Ithakaby Ron Sandford

Absence in Ithaka

If this island belonged to me, I would buryall my books and never go away. –Byron

There are more tourists than rainon more famous islands,for the centuries sleep in Ithaka,
with no trace of its famous past.Profuse clusters of grapes hang overthe balcony above the closed
Communist Party office a block from the harborwhich the town bends its U around,
the houses that climb the hills flashing in this light,that light, this water and air

sharp and clear as an edge of broken glass.I feel as odd in this waterside tavernaas I felt the first night I spent in London
when I walked into Sloane Square’s King’s Head to the tune of Hotel California,a Los Angeles boy whose home follows
him everywhere.Ithaka could be Catalinawith the same chapparal-clad hills,
the same light half a world away, my head full of stories, like Odysseus’s,always tempted to think at each landfall

‘I could forget everything here and besomething new’,yet who stayed himself everywhere
until after twenty years of wading through bloodhe stood again beside his Penelope
and only then remembered he never wanted to go.What holds one forgetting to another,
one story to the next, one strange life to another,each departure to a return

through and above or belowall the upheavals that make their wayinto our histories, stories, dreams?
As I puzzle,a young couple stroll along the harborhand-in-hand,
fresh from love made in a cool room before the suncould turn their caresses to sweat-soaked
gropings and groans.Did they walk this way after Odysseus left,when the Romans came, and Byzantines,

and Venetians, and Turks, and again the Greeks?Because their serene walk beside the waterin whose sparkle Aphrodite still dances
gives all those histories, stories, dreamstheir ground:love anonymous except to lovers,
not when swept awaybut in those moments when they knowthey will share themselves again
to heal the heart’s harms, and complete the world— love standinghowever absence piles on absence
against the tides of oblivion.